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Google Maps is paying off for businesses, a small revolution that wakes up an Internet mapping market long anesthetized by the near-free services of the American giant.
In May, "I received a coup of wire of Google Ireland ", tells Stephen Bousquet, creator and animator of the site calculitineraires.fr used by the hikers and the cyclists to prepare their circuits.
With the new tariffs of the American giant, the invoice of the site would pbad" de less than a hundred euros a month to just over 5,000 euros ", and all this before the summer of 2018, he explains. "I spent a few sleepless nights" to find a solution, he says.
Since it arrived a dozen years ago, Google Maps has gained overwhelming dominance in the mapping market for websites. This allows, for example, online booking sites to display the location of a hotel or chain stores to locate their nearest site to the user.
By offering its services for free, then not charging that the very large consumers, Google Maps has ousted competitors who until his arrival made pay for their services, including Viamichelin and Mappy.
But the American group has just reversed the table by significantly lowering the threshold of pricing and by greatly increasing its prices.
Since July 16, the dynamic cards (which allow for example the user to zoom) are paying from 28,000 downloads per month, while the threshold was up to now from 25,000 … per day
And the price per dynamic card downloaded is now $ 7 for 1,000 downloads, against $ 0.50 before, a multiplication by 14 of the tariff. 19659002] "We are professionalising our products, it's a repositioning of our offer", one says at Google to explain this sharp rise in price. "And we offer a coupon of 200 dollars", that is to say that the bill becomes payable only from this amount, it adds the same source.
– The competition awoke – [19659002] Google's announcement provoked an influx of demands from the few competitors who had managed to survive in niche markets and can once again dream of finding bigger markets.
"We are in touch with about fifty "Google Maps" customers who consult us, "said Dorothée Mani, general manager of the Evermaps SME. "We have already merged Leader Price and Gites de France."
"Our offers allow price differences between 35% and 65% in our favor," she says.
Visible effect also at Mappy , a subsidiary of the SoLocal group (ex-Yellow Pages), again solicited on this market.
"Google had killed all the actors, so it was no longer a priority for us," says Bruno Dachary, CEO of Mappy . "This is not an avalanche, but there is a business flow."
Google's decision is also turning the blind eye to OpenStreetMap, a global badociative project of constitution of cartographic data accessible to all, which becomes suddenly a key actor of the sector.
– A rise "too brutal" –
With its free data, OpenStreetMap feeds mapping services companies, which will now be able to return to the market and compete with Google Maps.
"When Google Maps is at $ 7 the 1,000 dynamic maps downloaded, we are at 50 cents," says Loic Ortola, technical director of Jawg maps, which source data in OpenStreetMap.
In fact, "we return in the normal order of things," said Benoit Fournier, a French volunteer OpenStreetMap: the basic data is free but the service provided by the companies that work "is paying".
Stephen Bousquet, moderator of calculitineraires.fr, now uses data from OpenStreetMap, with a quality of service for the user which remains however for the moment less than the one he had before with Google Maps.
Does he want the American giant to have let it fall?
Google Maps has gone to pay "too brutally and too fast," he criticizes. But Google and its near-free service "have served me well, allowing me to develop my site," he admits.
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